#580: In Case You Missed It: February 2022 Recap of The Tim Ferriss Show

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. This is a special inbetweenisode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can easily jump around to get a feel for the episode and guest. Based on your feedback, this format has been tweaked and improved since the first recap episode. For instance, @hypersundays on Twitter https://twitter.com/hypersundays/status/1496997636846780416 suggested that the bios for each guest can slow the momentum, so we moved all the bios to the end. See it as a teaser. Something to whet your appetite. If you like what you hear, you can of course find the full episodes at tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=monthly-recap. Please enjoy! *** Timestamps: Cal Newport: 01:31 Margaret Atwood: 07:12 Boyd Varty: 11:48 Ayana Johnson: 19:40 Bill Rasmussen: 23:47 *** Full episode titles: Cal Newport — The Eternal Pursuit of Craftsmanship, the Deep Life, Slow Productivity, and a 30-Day Digital Minimalism Challenge https://tim.blog/2022/02/02/cal-newport/ Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/ Boyd Varty — The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life https://tim.blog/2022/02/15/boyd-varty/ Marine Biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on How to Catalyze Change with Awe and Wonder, How to Save the Planet, Finding Your Unique Venn Diagram of Strength, and Seeking the Minimum Effective Dose https://tim.blog/2022/02/09/ayana-elizabeth-johnson/ ESPN Co-Founder Bill Rasmussen — Fear{less} with Tim Ferriss https://tim.blog/2022/02/04/bill-rasmussen-fearless/ *** For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Balaji Srinivasan https://tim.blog/2021/11/15/balaji-srinivasan-2/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, Dr. Michio Kaku https://tim.blog/2022/01/07/michio-kaku/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-between-isode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. Based on your feedback, this format has been tweaked and improved since the last recap episode. For instance, @HyperSundays on Twitter suggested that the bios for each guest can kind of slow down the momentum in this format, so we moved all the bios to the end. So we are listening. Keep giving us feedback.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description, probably right below wherever you press "Play" in your podcast app. Or, as usual, you can head to tim.blog/podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.

• 1:31Tim Ferriss?

  Could you speak to slow productivity? And perhaps you could speak to John Gribbin's book, The Scientists. You mentioned a bunch of scientists earlier in this conversation, because you strike me also as kind of a proof case or a test case of slow productivity in a world where it is thought by and large to not be possible or to just be outdated. So could you just expand on that in any way that makes sense to you?

• 2:01Cal Newport?

  Well, I mean, I'll tell you, and this is literally true. What I was doing in the moments before we logged on to do this discussion right now, it was in the other room in my office this year, with a notebook, working on slow productivity, notes on slow productivity, because I'm thinking about maybe writing a book on it, but I'm still in the earlier stages. And I had gone for a walk earlier and had been developing some new thoughts, and I wanted to get them down. So I was actually pretty frantically taking notes in my notebook as I was looking at the clock, like I got to get in to talk to Tim. So when I say it's fresh in my mind, I mean, it's literally, it's literally fresh in my mind. And so that's a big caveat. That means this is not a fully baked idea. I love half-baked ideas. Yes, the ingredients are swirling.

• 2:44Cal Newport?

  So here, I'll pitch you what I wrote down this an hour ago. So as of an hour ago, this is the way. Because what I do when I'm thinking about ideas is I try to basically re-pitch them out from scratch, and I do that again and again. And each time I do it, there's overlap with the previous times, but also new pieces. And that's how it polishes. It's why it takes me six months to a year to get, for example, a book idea ready to even propose. It's just, this is the, like we talked about, the math mind. Like, I need the pieces to make sense. So my current take on slow productivity is the problem itself. So here's the problem we're facing. The human brain is wired. It's good at making a plan for executing something that you think is important, and it makes you feel good when you complete that plan.

• 3:27Cal Newport?

  This is critical to humans, why we're different than a lot of animals. We can, we can actually come up with a plan to do something and feel motivation to do it and feel good when we actually, you know, we need to fix the fence. We fix the fence, the cattle can't get out, we feel really good. The issue is, if you don't do anything, let's say, I'm not making any plans, I don't want to do anything, we know that makes you feel terrible. So you take away people's autonomy, their sense of efficacy, and they're miserable. We know that. But if you put too much on people's plates, so that now you have more on your plate, more obligations to which you have some sort of ascent to complete, then you can easily conceive actually all getting done, you short-circuit that drive.

• 4:05Cal Newport?

  Just like your drive for hunger is really important, but if you eat like a huge amount of junk food, it short circuits the drive and you end up unhealthy. So when we have way too much on our plate, more than we can easily imagine how it's going to get done, it makes us really unhappy because we're short circuiting a cognitive drive here and we get sort of anxious and overwhelmed and it doesn't feel good. And so we can't treat humans like we would a computer processor. When a computer processor, you want to pipeline as many instructions as possible that are sitting there so that not a single cycle is wasted because you just want to make sure that you always have something to do. But for the human brain, that huge pipeline of things that are waiting to be done actually makes the brain unhappy. Our solution to this type of overload, we have too much on our plate in work and in our life admin as well.

• 4:47Cal Newport?

  Our solution has been to use fast productivity. So fast productivity are like tactics and systems for increasing the amount of things you finish on the scale of days and weeks. So how do I get more stuff? This is what all productivity software is about. Lower friction, easier access to information, take out seven steps in the process of getting this meeting scheduled. We want to maximize the number of things we can execute on the scales of days and weeks. My emerging concept of slow productivity says shift that scale up to years, months and years. I want to maximize the amount of meaningful stuff I get done in the next five years. It completely changes the game in a way that becomes very compatible with the human brain.

• 5:28Cal Newport?

  Because now suddenly, while I'm going to try to do a lot less, the stuff I'm doing, I'm doing it on a larger time scale. So maybe I'm working a lot on it this week and then I go a month without doing it at all and I have a hard day today and an off day tomorrow. You have the seasonality, up and down rhythms, which is a better fit for the human brain. You get rid of the sense of overload because if you want to produce, you know, a good book in the next two years, that's a very different set of initiatives than I want to do as many writerly related promotional things as possible this week. Like that latter could be a real source of stress and overload. The former can be a real source of fulfillment and you tend to produce things of higher value because when you're just focusing on maximizing what you can do in the scale

• 6:08Cal Newport?

  of days or weeks, it diverts the sustained application of energy and attention needed to actually do the things that move the needle or that you're proud of. And so I think it's a real issue. I think in the workplace, we have to completely rethink work allocation. Our current mode of doing this is completely incompatible with slow productivity. We basically just throw an unlimited amount of work at individuals and say it's up to you to self-regulate. It's an impossible task to ask. And so, you know, I had this New Yorker piece recently called, "Why Do We Work Too Much?" And I sort of make this argument in there that if we have to self-regulate, we're just going to end up with 20% too much on our plate. We're going to let stress be the feedback function that slows us down. And in our personal lives, we probably need to be doing

• 6:50Cal Newport?

  significantly less, but the stuff we're doing, do it better and over longer time periods. So I, so there's just this fundamental mismatch with our brain that's happening right now, that this epidemic of busyness, I think, is causing issues because of its mismatch with our brain. And maybe something like slow productivity is the way out of it.

• 7:12Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to chat with you about something that I think a lot of my listeners would be very interested in, and certainly I'll be interested in exploring a bit. And that is the, what seems like a predilection to resist labels or being labeled, being claimed for causes. And you wrote an essay titled "On Being a Woman Writer," which got a lot of attention. Is it fair to say that you resist labels being labeled? And if so, why is that? How would you explain that?

• 7:46Speaker 04

  I resist closed boxes. Okay. The reason I resist closed boxes is that nature does not deal in closed boxes.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, it doesn't. If it did, there wouldn't have been any evolution. If it did, you and I would not exist. So, everything in nature is on a bell curve. There are a lot of liminal beings, or let's say, forms that cannot be put into closed boxes, such as, for instance, the platypus. So I just don't like closed boxes. And labels are a way of filing people. "Oh, you're a this. We're going to file you there, under this..." Letter, your box is going to go there and that's who you are and that's all you are. And I don't think that's true of anyone. And I do think we all contain multitudes.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  So that's probably why you can say, sure, I'm a woman writer. I'm a woman, I'm a writer. But that's not the end of the story. There have been a lot of women writers and not all of them are exactly like me. So we don't, you can put a general heading over something, just as you can put a general heading over science fiction, speculative fiction, stories about werewolves, Dracula, Frankenstein, ghost stories, they're all wonder tales. You can call them all wonder tales. So you can call all women writers, women writers, but that's not the end of the story. There's a lot of other things that can be added to that.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  So Dracula is not the same as War of the Worlds. They're both wonder tales, but they're very different like that. So sure, let's say, woman writer, eighty-two, generational, okay? Country, city, height, hair, curly. That's important, Tim. So like that, so you can, you can build out the picture. You can, you can start with a few labels, but it's not the whole story for anybody. And if you're a novelist, of course, you deal in individuals. So you're not just doing types. Does that make any sense to you?

• 10:10Tim Ferriss?

  It makes perfect sense, makes perfect sense. You know, I think that labels are also dangerous because if you assume them for yourself, you're more inclined, if you get attached to them, to want to defend those labels as a facet or as the sole entirety of your identity. And that's, I think, how we end up in a lot of the places where we find ourselves collectively now.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, people attach labels to other people and then they attack the label. And that has been going on for at least, you know, five thousand years, as far as we know.

• 10:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, a few years.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, quite a few years. So that's, that's a thing that if we wish to live in a multiple democracy, we should attempt to go beyond labels. And of course, what people then go is, well, you're a feminist. And then I always have to say, what kind of feminist are you talking about? Because there's at least 75 different kinds. So am I the kind that thinks all men should be rounded up and shoved off a cliff? Except for 10% kept for breeding? No, I am not that kind. You will be happy to know, Tim.

• 11:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, thank you.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  I think you're happy to know.

• 11:24Tim Ferriss?

  No, I said.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  You don't want to be kept for breeding, do you?

• 11:26Tim Ferriss?

  I want to be kept for breeding, yes. Please keep me for breeding.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  No, you don't.

• 11:31Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe not, maybe not. It depends on the, it really depends on how that's all organized.

• 11:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, I should probably think more before I answer these types of things, but.

• 11:48Tim Ferriss?

  Plane ride, bird. Does this mean anything?

• 11:54Speaker 05

  Okay, the, the, I think you're referring to the White Knuckle Charter Company.

• 11:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's the one.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  So basically what happened is my parents, they launched the safari business. And it slowly started to become successful. But they started to run into a problem as my sister and I were getting older because schools started to become an issue. So there was obviously no, nowhere to take us to school living out here. So they decided that what they would do is they would learn to fly. And then they would ferry us into the nearest town. And we would sort of attend early preschool of whatever it's called, like Monday through Wednesday. And then Wednesday, we would fly back to the reserve and we would be here through the weekend. And we were basically getting three days of schooling. That seemed like enough to them at the time. So they took up flying. And my memories of it are when they would pick us up on a Wednesday afternoon.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  To be honest, they weren't great pilots. So they would, they were in a bit of a state, you know, the, the first 50 hours of being a pilot. There's a lot of stress about getting it in the air and then safely getting it back on the ground. So they would, we would arrive and they would say to us, we're in flying mode right now. And flying mode meant we could not ask any questions. We had to shut up. Kids, you kids, shut up. We're in flying mode. And then they had this other sort of drill that they worked out with each other, which was called Pilot in Command. And when they were up front there in the cockpit, the one would say, I am now pilot in command. And if you handed over control, you would say, handing over control. And the other would say, I am now pilot in command. Pilot in command, handing over to pilot in command. I am now pilot in command. And they had this whole drill, right?

• 13:29Speaker 05

  The first crash that we were involved in, we came into land and we had a plane. It was a little Cessna that had a quirk. And let me tell you, when it comes to aviation, you don't want planes with quirks. You can have a quirky like pickup truck, but you cannot have a quirky aircraft. The quirk was that when you pulled the power, not all power cut off. It kept a little bleed of power on. So my mother was flying the plane. She came into land on the little eight hundred meter dirt strip. She cut the power. The plane sort of landed, but it just kept on a little too much power and we kept going. And she started to say to my father, and my sister and I are watching from the back in flying mode, I can't get the power off. I can't get the power off. I can't get the speed off. And he says, he's saying to her, you are pilot in command.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  You are pilot in command. And she's going, I know, but I can't get the speed off. And eventually she kicks the rudder and the plane veers off the runway and we hit a marula tree and we stop. That was our, that's our first crash. And it's one of those, it's one of those ones, Tim, that if you bring it up today, like at dinner, he will say, will say, well, you know, I couldn't get the speed off. And he'll say, my father will say, well, you were pilot in command. And immediately a fight will develop at dinner. I know I was pilot in command, but before we hit the tree, do you think you could have pulled the power? You could have. So like it's, there's a little tension around it. Anyway, the worst one was we were flying a short hop. And by this stage, my parents had launched, you know, a bigger safari company and they had decided that when they flew, they should actually have a commercial pilot with them.

• 14:59Speaker 05

  And so the setup was it's a commercial pilot in the left hand seat. It's my father in the right hand seat. And then there's club seating, four seats in the back, but you sit facing each other like you would on a train, you know, like looking at each other. So we're flying along and I see my mother and her friend are sitting opposite me and they're looking towards the cockpit. I'm looking back at them and suddenly we just hear this outrageous like sound, bah! And wind fills the cockpit and it's just this incredible rushing sound, amazing sound.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  Looking at my mother and her friend next to her, it looks like pulp fiction. There is just blood and guts all over them. It looks like someone took a bird, put it in a blender and made like a bird smoothie and then threw it over them. They've got a wing on their head, they've got a foot on their shoulder, they are covered in blood and guts. And so I turn and I look back at the cockpit, the front window of the plane is gone, the pilot is conked out, he's passed out in his seat and my father is like orientating himself in the madness. And right at that moment, as he sort of, as my father got his bearings, I saw him grab

• 16:13Speaker 05

  the controls and then he looked back at me and said, "I am pilot in command." And, and so now we realise we've got a situation. What had happened is we had hit a stork, direct bird strike, and the bird had come in the window and in fact, the bird had hit the pilot, the beak had gone into the skin between the pilot's skull and the skin. So he had a beak sticking out of his face and a bit of stork neck sticking out of his face and he's totally passed out. Meantime, my father has taken control of the plane, the woman on the backseat screaming next to my mom is going, "We're all gonna die, we're all gonna die."

• 16:56Speaker 05

  And that's when my mother gave her the patented mother slap, slapped her twice and said, "We are not gonna die." And then out of nowhere, my mother reaches into her sort of handbag and pulls out a flight call sheet and she starts screaming standard emergency practices to my father. "Call SOS base, request emergency landing" and he's ticking off things. Now, at this point, the pilot starts to wake up and he wakes up and he's slowly gaining his bearings and as he looks around, he has this strange kind of dot in his vision and as he's looking around, the dot follows him and he eventually puts his hand up and what

• 17:39Speaker 05

  it is, it's the stork's neck sticking out of his face that everywhere he looks, it's in his line of sight because it's connected to his face. And it was at that moment that he grabbed the neck and the beak of the stork and he pulled it out of his face and looked at it and then passed out again.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  And I don't know if you've ever seen a head wound, but head wounds bleed nicely. And so he's bleeding quite intensely. It's pandemonium back there, but my folks have got the controls. They're calling, they call the airport. My father starts the descent and eventually the pilot wakes up and he comes to and he's actually, he's all right. And he takes over control of the plane again and we do an emergency landing. And the funny thing about it was we were flying from the reserve to go and catch a commercial flight. So we landed at a commercial airport and we got out covered in stalk, stalk wing and stalk foot and stalk guts. And we walked into the terminal building and I said to my mother, well, what do we do now? She said, just board the flight and look forward. So we got onto the plane, looking like we had been in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and

• 18:40Speaker 05

  just sat down next to regular folks traveling, covered in guts and blood and just sat there and looked forward and flew to our next destination like nothing had happened. But it was a, you know, we grew up in a real wild way. We grew up in a pioneering way and my parents were irrepressible, I think is the word, which you kind of have to be to run a safari business where things, you know, running a safari business, you're out in nature and things are happening and unexpected things are happening almost continuously. So that was kind of my wild youth in some ways, you know, was very, very orientated towards that kind of South African wildness. And, and also I think that we were, we've changed a lot over the years, but, and we've

• 19:22Speaker 05

  been in our own healing journeys and our own healing journeys have changed us as a family for sure. But for many years there, we were just kind of packing on, you know, I guess we were frozen by some trauma ourselves and we were just living as wildly through it as we could.

• 19:40Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think there are other ways to introduce people to the ecosystem that includes climate change, to make them beneficial proactive participants that include sort of awe and wonder in, in ways that I haven't described? It's a very long-winded question, but I've never asked it before.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  I'm with you. I think like fear and anxiety and really unpleasant news is not terribly motivating for most people. It is for some. For me, I actually don't that often think about the details of how.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Bad the scientific projections are and exactly what's happening to ecosystems. I focus almost entirely on solutions. My perspective is like, it's as bad as we thought and actually worse and it's all happening fast. And then I immediately pivot to what are we going to do about it? Like, what can I do to help? And I think the thing that's really interesting to me and actually super inspiring is that we basically have all the solutions we need. We know how to transition to 100% renewable energy. We know how to farm in regenerative ways that restore carbon to the soil instead of emitting it, right? We know how to transform public transit in cities. We know how to compost food. We already know how to do all this stuff.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  We know how to make buildings more efficient. We know how to improve manufacturing processes. It's just a matter of how fast we're going to do this and whether people will get out of their own ways and be able to forsake the self-interest, whether that's money or power, and just get this shit done. And to me, that is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. I'm like, how are we going to get this shit done? Because we can, like, because it is a possibility, because we have this wide range of possible futures still available to us. And I want to be part of making sure we get the best one. And so the things that I get excited about, that I think many people could and will get

• 21:48Speaker 01

  more excited about as media starts to shift from problem to solutions, is that coastal ecosystems like wetlands and mangroves can absorb five times more carbon than a forest on land. Let's protect and restore those. Let's think about farming oysters and seaweed in the ocean. It absorbs a lot of carbon and is like a super low footprint source of food. I don't know, you probably have a take on whether those are good things to eat, but they're super sustainable, I'll tell you that part. Many Americans are iodine deficient.

• 22:18Tim Ferriss?

  We're gonna come back to that. We're coming back to that.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, some people get really excited about the technology, figuring out how we're gonna go from these like clunky solar panels to solar panels that are just like regular roof tiles, or how we're going to sort of shift our food systems to accommodate for these things. What is the role of technology? What is the role of culture? What is the role of politics? Some people just like love getting out of bed in the morning and harassing politicians into doing better on climate policy. And like, I'm glad that that float your boat. And so I think... It can be very exciting to consider how to put your interests, passions, superpowers to work towards specific climate solutions. And we don't have to do all of them. Like, everyone just has to do something. And the solutions are really cool. Like offshore

• 23:04Speaker 01

  wind turbines powering the 40% of Americans who live in coastal counties. That would be great. Let's get it going. And so I guess if you think only about the problem, then of course, it's a bummer. And I sort of fell into that trap when you asked me the question in its previous framing. But when you think about the solutions, there's like no limit to the sources of inspiration and places to look and things. You'd be like, ooh, I want that. I want to help with that. I want to support that. I want to like fund that. I want to innovate the 2.0 version of that.

• 23:47Tim Ferriss?

  ESPN. What was the original incarnation? You said you incorporated it. When you incorporated it, what in your mind was ESPN? And how did you choose the name?

• 23:58Bill Rasmussen?

  We knew we were going to do 24 hour sports at that point. We had, we had made that decision. And a colleague, he was a partner in an advertising firm. One of their clients was the Connecticut Natural Gas Company, who was running a promo for an energy saving program. Recognize the letters? E S P. To do animation in those days was very, very expensive. And we had no money. We started this whole thing with a $9,000 credit card cash advance. So, you know, you have to husband your dollars. They had this great graphic. And there was something circling the globe. And here was, you know, clouds and all this

• 24:39Bill Rasmussen?

  motion. And they had done it. And it said ESP, ESP going around. And so he called and he said, you know, I think you guys have a great idea. I'd like to come to work for you. And I said, you know, we couldn't hire anybody. And I said, I'll tell you what, that Connecticut Natural Gas thing, if you can bring that graphic, minus the, you know, no audio, just bring that graphic and we can put our own words to it, you're hired. He called me next morning, he said, when do I start? I nearly fell over. I couldn't believe he'd pull it off. He got permission from Connecticut Natural Gas to take the stuff that they had paid for, the graphic, the visual, and brought it to us. And so we had the ESPN. Well, that wasn't gonna work. We, you know, we thought

• 25:23Bill Rasmussen?

  we would be the ESPN, Sports Programming Network, but somebody already had a Satellite Programming Network, so we couldn't use it. So he had the E on the front end, and we figured we could add the N on the back end, and we'll see. But the original version of ESPN was the E period, S period, P period, network. And it was a kooky looking logo, I have to tell you.

• 25:46Tim Ferriss?

  And it sounds a lot like registering these days in a website. It's dope, and you're like, oh, well, that one's taken, this one's taken. Well, if we had a letter here, subtract one here, add another one there.

• 25:56Bill Rasmussen?

  Yeah. So now it's time to move ahead, and we're looking for funds.

• 26:00Tim Ferriss?

  You got a nice chunk of change. We can talk about, I think it was 9,000, 30,000 kind of family and friends, correct me if I'm wrong?

• 26:06Bill Rasmussen?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 26:07Tim Ferriss?

  And then Getty Oil came.

• 26:09Bill Rasmussen?

  Not quite. There was an interim step in there.

• 26:10Tim Ferriss?

  There's an interim step. What happened?

• 26:12Bill Rasmussen?

  We had some appointments with some very, very big and powerful companies. The Pittsburgh Plate Class people, the Campbell Soup Foundation. I mean, they were big companies. And with TAF Broadcasting, do you remember that? They went out of business, I don't know at what point along the way. Anyway, we went out there, I visited with them, I actually met with the board, and the chairman hosted me. We had a delightful lunch. We talked a little bit, and then he walked me to the front door and out into the parking lot for my rental car, and he said, we really appreciate your coming. I mean, figuratively, you know, patting me on the head and saying, you're a delightful young man, thank you for coming today, but

• 26:55Bill Rasmussen?

  I have to tell you, your idea simply will not work. Oh, and one other thing, he said, there will be no cable television three years from today. TAF Broadcasting went out of business, I just don't remember when. Cable television's live as well.

• 27:15Tim Ferriss?

  How did you feel when he said that to you and dismissed you in the parking lot?

• 27:21Bill Rasmussen?

  I thought he made a mistake. He was a nice man. I wasn't going to say anything nasty to him. I had no negative reaction to him. I just knew he was wrong. I just thought he made a mistake. He had a great opportunity and they might still be around today if he had made the right decision. That sounds copy. I didn't mean it that way.

• 27:39Bill Rasmussen?

  But that was the sixth company we had been to and then we ended up coming out to Getty Oil. Met with the vice president and explained the whole thing and he was very skeptical and so on. But what I didn't know is that he was a gentleman who really liked the idea because it was putting him close to television and he lived in Hollywood and all this kind of stuff. And many, many years later, this finance manager told me, he said, "You don't know this, but his office was on the 18th floor and he called me when you left his office and he said, "I swear before the elevator got to the bottom floor, he had called me and said, "George, we're going in the television business." Because he wanted to be in the television business.

• 28:25Tim Ferriss?

  And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, who previously earned his PhD from MIT. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. Newport is the author of seven books, that's a lot of books, man, including, most recently, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email. I think some of those allude to how he's able to get so much done. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. You can find him online at calnewport.com.

• 29:09Tim Ferriss?

  And there are a number of things conspicuously absent from this bio. And thank you so much, Cal, for sending me an elegant streamlined bio. I sometimes get five or six pages that need to get cut down.

• 29:24Tim Ferriss?

  My guest today is a living legend. I have been wanting to interview her for so long, probably more than a decade, Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade, was published November 2020. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the long-waited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, now an award-winning TV series. I believe in 2017 it was the most read book across all of Amazon, at least so Amazon reports. She has won more prizes than I can possibly list out. Her other works of fiction include Cat's Eye, finalist for

• 30:08Tim Ferriss?

  the 1989 Booker Prize, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize, the Mad Adam Trilogy, and Hag Seed, William Shakespeare's The Tempest Retold. Margaret's work has been published in more than 45 countries, and she is the recipient of numerous awards, as mentioned, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Friends Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovators Award. Burning Questions, a collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, will be published in March of this year, 2022 that is. Practical Utopias,

• 30:49Tim Ferriss?

  an exploration of the possible, an eight-week live online learning experience, will run later this year, and Margaret is heavily involved. You can find her online at margaretatwood.ca, on Twitter, at Margaret Atwood, on Instagram, TheRealMargaretAtwood. And without further ado, please enjoy a conversation that turned out even so much better than I possibly could have hoped with Margaret Atwood.

• 31:18Tim Ferriss?

  I am so supremely excited about my guest today. I have been hoping to have him on for a very long time, indeed. His name is Boyd Varty. You can find him on Twitter at Boyd Varty, B-O-Y-D-V-A-R-T-Y. He is the author of two books, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life and his memoir Cathedral of the Wild. He's been featured in The New York Times, NBC, and other media, and has taught his philosophy of tracking your life to individuals and companies around the world. I happen to know quite a few of those individuals, in fact. Boyd is a wildlife and literacy activist who has spent the last 10 years refining the art of using wilderness as a place for deep introspection and personal transformation. He grew up in South Africa on Londelosi Game Reserve, a former hunting ground that was transformed into a nature preserve by Boyd's father and uncle, both visionaries of the

• 32:03Tim Ferriss?

  Restoration Movement. Under his family's stewardship, the reserve became renowned not only as a sanctuary for animals, but as a place where once ravaged land was able to flourish again and where the human spirit could be restored. When Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years of imprisonment, he came to Londelosi Game Reserve to recover. Boyd has a degree in psychology from the University of South Africa. He is a TED speaker and the host of the Track Your Life podcast as well. You can find him online at BoydVarty.com, B-O-Y-D-V-A-R-T-Y.com, on Twitter at Boyd Varty, Instagram at Boyd underscore Varty. My guest today is Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. And Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine

• 32:46Tim Ferriss?

  biologist, policy expert, writer, and Brooklyn native. She is co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for coastal cities, and co-creator of the Spotify slash Gimlet podcast, How to Save a Planet on Climate Solutions, which I started listening to this past summer every morning as I drove to the gym and I became hooked on it for a bunch of reasons that are not immediately obvious, I suppose. She co-edited the bestselling climate anthology, All We Can Save, and co-founded the All We Can Save Project. Recently, she co-authored the Blue New Deal, a roadmap for including the ocean in climate policy. Previously, she was executive director of the Wait Institute. Developed policy at the EPA and NOAA and taught as an adjunct professor at New York

• 33:31Tim Ferriss?

  University. Dr. Johnson earned a BA in environmental science and public policy from Harvard University and a PhD in marine biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She publishes widely, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Scientific American. She's on the 2021 Time 100 Next List and was named one of Elle's 27 Women Leading the Charge to Protect Our Environment. Outside magazine called her, quote, "the climate leader we need," end quote. You can find her online at ayanaelizabeth.com, on Twitter, at Ayana Eliza, that's E-L-I-Z-A, on Instagram, at Ayana Eliza as well. Urban Ocean Lab can be found at urbanoceanlab.org.

• 34:15Tim Ferriss?

  The All We Can Save project can be found at allwecansave.earth. We'll link to all the social handles for all of these things in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And so now, without further ado, please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. I learned a lot. I had a great time, laughed even a few times, hopefully make you laugh a few times. And please enjoy.

• 34:43Tim Ferriss?

  By show of hands, how many people here wait for, say, the morning paper to get their sports scores? It's a big fat zero. How many of you can remember when television wasn't available 24 hours a day? Anyone? All right, of my generation or a little bit older, got a few hands. And when I say Bristol, Connecticut, what do you think of? After meeting my guest tonight, you'll associate it with one thing, and that is sports. Against all odds, he set out to change the course of television in the status quo as we know it. And in the process, he created one of the most iconic and recognizable brands in the world. Please welcome the founder of ESPN, Bill Rasmus.

• 35:31Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 36:14Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.